USA > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco > A history of the city of San Francisco; and incidentally of the state of California > Part 16
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dently that he would be executed without delay. He was assured that he should have a fair and deliberate trial, with a right to be heard in his defense. He submitted then with a good grace, was led out, placed in a carriage, and driven under strong guard to the vigilance headquarters, where he was securely im- mured. Charles Cora, who had murdered United States Marshal Richardson, and had been tried once, with a disagreement of the jury, was also taken from the jail to the same place. On Monday King died, and on Tuesday the executive committee, acting as a jury, tried Casey. No person was present at the trial save the accused, members of the vigilance committee and witnesses. The testimony was given under oath though there was no lawful authority for its administra- tion. Hearsay testimony was excluded; the general rules of evidence observed in the courts were adopted; the accused heard all the witnesses, cross-examined those against him, summoned such as he wanted in his favor, had an attorney to assist him, and was per- mitted to make an argument by himself or his attorney in his own defense. Both Casey and Cora were con- victed.
On Wednesday, King was buried with a grand and solemn funeral, the whole city being draped in mourn- ing; and while the procession was on the way to the cemetery, and in sight of it, Casey and Cora were hanged in front of the vigilance headquarters. Both claiming to be Catholics, were shrived by priests of their faith before execution, and their corpses were
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buried by their respective friends with much display. Casey at the time of his death was foreman of a vol- unteer fire company, which erected a monument over him in the graveyard of the old Mission church, with an inscription, "The Lord have mercy on my persecutors." The public woman who had supported Cora during the latter year of his life, and had been married to him in prison, provided a monument for him.
Before the execution of the two criminals, the sentences were submitted to and approved by the board of delegates, consisting of three members from each company, one of the delegates being usually its captain. This board was designed to prevent the adoption by the executive committee of any measure that would not give satisfaction to the majority of the members, and to exclude the suspicion of an in- tention to make a dangerous use of power.
SEC. 120. Ballot-box Stuffers. Having got rid of Casey, whose execution required urgency, the execu- tive committee settled down into regular business. They established a kitchen in their building, required half a dozen or more of their members to be present at all hours, and went to work to correct political abuses. They arrested half a dozen persons on charges of ballot-box stuffing, and among these was James Sullivan, a native of Ireland, a prize-fighter, a con- victed felon, a refugee from New South Wales, to which colony he had been transported, and a ballot- box stuffer, in which last capacity he had helped
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Casey to the place of supervisor. Demoralized by fright, he confessed his crimes and the promise that, as he was not guilty of murder, he would not be hanged, did not suffice to give him confidence. He committed suicide by cutting an artery in his arm with a table knife. It was the impression of those who observed him for several days before his death, that the unwonted deprivation of distilled liquor which he had used largely every day for years, pro- duced a disease in some respects similar to delirium tremens.
The executive committee were careful to take no evidence except that which would be received in the courts, and to execute no prisoner unless he had com- mitted a crime punishable with death under the law of California. What should be done with the crimi- nals guilty of ballot-box stuffing and frauds upon the public treasury ? They could not be consigned to the government prisons nor compelled to pay fines; and these were the usual punishments. No penalty seemed so convenient as banishment; about a score were taken to vessels bound for foreign ports, most of them to the Panama steamers, when about to leave the wharf, put on board, told that they would be hanged if they should come back, and sent away. One of the exiles returned while the committee was still in existence; but instead of executing him the committee explained that he would be spared because, on account of his nervous condition, his sentence with the penalty of death for return was not read to him.
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The vigilance organization did not interfere in any way with the ordinary business of the courts and the police. The district courts sat every day to try suits involving rights of property, and the criminal courts sentenced offenders for theft, assault and drunkenness as in ordinary times. The city was far more orderly than ever before or since. The professional criminals, as a class, fled in terror. They would rather work for a living than face the danger of prompt and severe justice. Everybody was on his good behavior.
SEC. 121. Law and Order Party. Meantime the state authorities were not idle. The governor selected W. T. Sherman (who had before been in the federal army, and is now its highest general) to command the militia in the district of San Francisco, and put down the committee by force. Sherman entered upon the duties of his position with zeal, but found himself confronted by many difficulties. The com- mittee, supported by a strong public opinion and liberal money contributions, had obtained nearly all the arms in the city. The law and order party were divided among themselves and almost without funds. A public meeting held by the law and order party to organize opposition to the committee was a failure. The governor applied to General Wool of the United States army for aid with the federal troops, and was denied. Some of the responsibility for this action was attributed to Dr. Gwin, who, according to report, was pleased to see the manner in which Broderick's polit- ical friends were treated. Certainly Gwin did not
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distinguish himself by hostility to the committee; nor would it have been politic for him or his party to do so on the eve of a presidential election. Sherman, finding that he could not procure arms, and that his views did not agree with those of Governor Johnson, resigned. Volney E. Howard was appointed to suc- ceed him, but did nothing of note.
SEC. 122. Arrest of Terry. The next step of Gov- ernor Johnson was to request President Pierce to order the military and naval forces of the United States to attack the committee; and he reported that the committee was hostile to the federal authority, and meant secession. This assertion commanded no credit, and injured the influence of Governor Johnson. His application was denied.
On the twenty-first of June, S. A. Hopkins, a vigilance sergeant, with two soldiers, was ordered to arrest Reuben Maloney, who was wanted as a witness to testify in reference to some state arms which had been shipped in his custody for the state troops from Sacramento to San Francisco on a schooner which J. L. Durkee, under order from the committee, had seized at the strait between San Pablo and San Francisco bays. Maloney was in a room with D. S. Terry, chief justice of the supreme court of the state, and a friend, and they said Maloney should not be arrested in their presence. The sergeant went off, soon returning with reinforcements, met Malony and his companions going to the state armory, and undertook to make the ar- rest there. Resistance was offered, and Hopkins hav-
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ing seized Terry's gun, the latter stabbed him in the neck, inflicting a wound which it was supposed would prove fatal, though fortunately it soon healed. Terry was held a close prisoner for seven weeks, went through a long trial, and was at last released, because Hopkins recovered.
The discharge of Terry gave great offense to many vigilantes, as the members of the committee were called, and the complaints were so loud, that the ex- ecutive committee called a meeting of the general committee, the first time the latter body had been brought together, and explained the motives of their conduct. It was approved, partly because it could not be undone. There were many hot heads who did not understand the serious dangers to which the movement and its leaders had been exposed on ac- count of Terry. If he had been executed for defend- ing a citizen against arrest by an organization estab- lished to defy the law, the state authorities would have made renewed efforts to punish the offenders, and the federal administration would probably have interfered. While Terry was in prison, the legisla- ture of Texas, where he had formerly resided, ad- dressed a memorial to Congress, praying for action to protect him. Soon after his arrest application was made to Judge McAllister, of the United States cir- cuit court, for a writ of habeas corpus, but the old gentleman did not wish to provoke the animosity of the people among whom he made his home and he refused, thus committing a glaring violation of his
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official duty. The committee would probably have made no resistance, for they did not want to come into conflict with the federal authority, and they con- sidered themselves extremely fortunate when the judge would not issue the writ. Before the arrest of Terry a writ of habeas corpus issued by one of the justices of the state supreme court, was treated with a show of respect, though the prisoner was not sur- rendered. He was taken from the vigilance building secretly and concealed elsewhere, and when the officer came with the writ he was politely conducted through all the rooms and assured by the persons in charge that nobody was deprived of his liberty by them. The committee felt safe in evading the order of a state court which was not supported by popular opin- ion, but to defy the federal government would have been a far more serious matter.
The general dissatisfaction among the members of the committee, with the discharge of Terry, was partly due to the prevalence of a rumor that he had boasted before going to the city that he would sweep the vigilantes into the bay; and although his en- counter with Hopkins had not occurred under circum- stances that permitted him to exercise his judicial authority, he had shown that he was not afraid to assume responsibility, or to defy the most serious danger. His release was regarded by some persons as giving power to the most formidable enemy of the reform movement. Terry's interference prolonged the existence of the organization. The executive
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committee had nearly finished all the work that ap- peared urgent to them, and they would probably have adopted a resolution for disbanding six weeks earlier than they did.
SEC. 123. McGowan. The main object of the ex- ecutive committee was from the first, in the opinion of some members at least, to secure political justice; the administration of criminal justice was regarded as of secondary importance, and of value mainly in so far as it could be made serviceable to the more important purpose. Political swindlers, under the pretense of managing the city government, had robbed the prop- erty owners of millions upon millions, and the duty now most pressing was to deprive them of their power. But for this object, the committee would, perhaps, have dissolved within a couple of weeks after the exe- cution of Casey. Several ballot-box stuffers (base and ignorant tools of cunning tricksters who devised the political frauds, and took their chief honors and prof- its,) confessed their crimes upon the ballot-box, and conveyed the idea that they had been guided by Ed- ward McGowan, who, having been accused of being an accomplice of Casey in the murder of King, had absconded. The committee made extraordinary efforts to get McGowan, gave him a close chase, and many narrow escapes, and sent parties after him by land and sea as far as Santa Barbara, but failed to catch him.
SEC. 124. Hetherington and Brace. On the twenty- ninth of July, two months after the execution of Casey and Cora, two other murderers, Joseph Hetherington.
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and Philander Brace were hanged. The crime of the latter had been committed two years before, and he had been tried by a criminal court, and acquitted in defiance of reason. These four executions were the only ones ordered by the vigilance committee of 1856. In every case the prisoner was, in the general opinion of the community, undoubtedly guilty of a capital crime, was kept several days in custody by the com- mittee before execution, so as to avoid all danger from hasty action, was tried deliberately, and was executed by daylight, publicly, and in the presence of a multi- tude of quiet people; the entire proceeding being as orderly, solemn, and respectful to the feelings of the criminals and their friends as if the execution had been conducted by a sheriff under the order of a high constitutional court.
SEC. 125. Disbandment. The executive committee were now anxious to close their labors, which de- manded much of their time, endangered their prop- erty and lives (for their executions, though justifiable morally, were murders in the eye of the law), exposed them to animosities that injured them in business and discommoded them in their social relations, and sub- jected them to a severe pecuniary tax. The expense of the committee, amounting for part of the time to five hundred dollars a day, had to be paid by subscrip- tion of the members and sympathizers. The burdens, dangers and inconveniencies were willingly borne while the committee had an abundance of important work to do, but after they had been in session two
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months and a half they came to the conclusion that a longer maintenance of the organization would be of doubtful benefit. There was no prospect of getting any new light on the political frauds; it would not do to hang offenders on general principles (that is, with- out legal proof of capital crimes), though there was no lack of hot heads in the general committee de- manding such a course; and it would be folly to maintain the organization for the purpose of punishing the ordinary murders that might be committed in the future.
Under the influence of such considerations, the executive committee, with the approval of the board of delegates, adopted a resolution to disband the forces. On the eighteenth of August the city took a general holiday to witness the celebration of the dis- banding of the vigilance committee, and thousands came from interior towns to see the men who had defied the law in the interest of justice and honesty for three months. The streets were bright with flags and flowers; the sidewalks were lined with ladies in brilliant dresses along the line adopted by the proces- sion, or rather the army, which contained five thou- sand one hundred and thirty-seven men, including three artillery companies with eighteen pieces of can- non, twenty-nine members of the executive committee, two hundred and ninety dragoons, forty-nine surgeons and physicians, one hundred and fifty members of the committee of vigilance of 1851, vigilant police, hun- dreds of citizens on horseback, thirty-three companies
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of the vigilant infantry, and numerous military bands. The troops were reviewed, and a farewell address was published by the executive committee, congratulating the general committee and the community on the val- uable service rendered, and promising that the organ- ization should be revived, if it were necessary, to protect its members against violence or malicious pros- ecution on account of the action of the committee, or to guard the purity of the ballot-box. It was never formally dissolved.
SEC. 126. Work of the Committee. This was the end of the active work of the committee. There never was any necessity or demand for the resumption of its activity. Durkee was tried on a charge of piracy, for taking state arms consigned to the law and order forces from the schooner "Julia" in the bay, but was acquitted. Several suits for damages were commenced by the exiles, but in most cases the plaint- iffs did not recover enough to pay expenses. Though the committee was practically dissolved, its influence lived; its members and sympathizers, having the con- fidence and favor of the people, obtained control of the city government, held it for nearly twenty years, and established and maintained the best and most economical city government in the United States- the municipal administration where the spoils system had less power than anywhere else under American dominion.
After the dissolution, many good citizens who had been opposed to the committe, partly because they
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feared that it would lead to great riots and reckless violence, expressed their satisfaction and surprise at the good results secured, and resumed their former relations of social friendship with the vigilance lead- ers. Others, however, cherished the bitterness against the committee, and after a lapse of twenty years some indications of it still crop out here and there.
The vigilance committees of San Francisco in 1851 and 1856 were in many important respects unlike any other extra-judicial movement to administer justice. They were not common mobs; they were organized for weeks or months of labor, deliberate in their movements, careful to keep records of their proceed- ings, strictly attentive to the rules of evidence and the penalties for crime accepted by civilized nations, confident of their power, and of their justification by public opinion, and not afraid of taking the public responsibility of their acts.
Many mobs in Montana, Colorado, Nevada, and other sparsely settled parts of the United States, have assumed or received the name of "vigilance committee" thus made respectable in San Francisco, but not one was governed by similar principles. They have been simple mobs, which collected on the first impulse of popular excitement and executed an of- fender or several within half a day and then dis- persed; or if there was an organization to be main- tained more than a day, it was composed of a few members, bound to secrecy, and they seized and exe- cuted their prisoners when masked or at night. It
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would be grossly unjust to judge the San Francisco vigilance committee by the acts of any other organiza- tion with a similar name elsewhere. The Fehm- Gericht of Westphalia, and the Santa Hermandad of Spain, though maintained for a longer period as extra- judicial organizations to administer justice, were de- cidedly inferior in efficiency, and in the precautions to prevent errors arising from haste or secrecy of pro- cedure.
The two San Francisco committees pursued the same system. It was entirely original, the out- growth of the local circumstances, and the best remedy in the judgment of many good citizens for public evils which had become intolerable. In 1851, as in 1856, quiet men said either they or the scoun- drels must leave San Francisco. The main work in the former year was to punish convicts from Austra- lia; in the latter it was to correct the abuses intro- duced by political tricksters from eastern cities. Each committee executed four men; each banished several scores; both were highly successful and earned an honorable place in history.
SEC. 127. People's Party. On the approach of the first city election held after the organization of the vigilance committee, a mass meeting called by some of its members appointed a convention of twenty- one respectable and prominent citizens to nominate candidates for the city offices. This convention se- lected its nominees from men who had been members of the committee, or sympathizers with it. The gen-
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eral of the vigilance army was selected for sheriff; the marshal of the vigilance police, for chief of the city police. The nominees as a class were far superior in business capacity and moral character to the previous city officials. The ticket included northern and south- ern men, republicans, democrats, and know-nothings, jews, catholics, and protestants. £ It deserved and commanded public confidence, and was elected.
The new administration was a marvel of economy. The expenses of the city and county had been two millions six hundred and forty-six thousand dollars in 1855, and in 1857 they were only three hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars. Much of this saving was due to the consolidation act adopted by the legis- lature in April, 1856; but a large part of it to the new officials. There was no doubt that the spirit of the administration was different from that of any of its predecessors. There was an entire absence of the partisan trickery, low scheming, and disreputable per- sonal association common about the city hall in pre- vious years. The general opinion of the men recog- nized as persons of influence in the city government demanded zealous devotion to the public interests in all the officials. Something of the reduction of ex- penditures was secured by cutting off needful supplies. Although there was a considerable increase in the number of school children every year, yet the average attendance in the public schools was four hundred less in 1857 than in 1856; so many children were ex- cluded from the public schools for the purpose of re-
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ducing expenditures. In the street department, a great saving was made by stopping the work of grad- ing, sewering and planking. The use of gas in the street lamps was stopped for a time, and when re- sumed, the quantity burned was smaller than before. These economies caused some inconvenience to the citizens, but they were delighted with the large reduc- tion of taxes; the more so on account of the general depression under which mercantile business and real estate had suffered for several years.
When the time for the election came in 1858, sev- eral thousand citizens signed a petition requesting the nominating convention of 1857 to appoint a new con- vention for the people's party, and it did so. The new organization resolved that none of its own mem- bers, and none of the members of the preceding con- vention should be nominated; that solicitation for a nomination by the candidate in person should be con- sidered an objection; that it was desirable that those officials who had performed their duties in a satis- factory manner should be retained; and that the nominations should be kept as independent as possible of national parties. The ticket was worthy of these prudent rules, and was elected by the people. With some minor changes and slight interruptions, this in- dependent city party had control of the government until 1874, a period of eighteen years.
The method of nomination was always substantially the same. A convention, the list of which had been prepared beforehand by a few persons, was submitted
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to a public meeting which had been called without notice of its main purpose, the names of the members of this convention submitted in a lump, without time for consideration, without an opportunity to reject or accept each individual by a separate vote, or to decide whether some other person would be preferred, was the foundation of all the subsequent nominations, and was the only people's party nominating convention that was ever submitted to any kind of a popular vote. There were no primary elections, no ward meetings, none of the trickery of professional politi- cians.
Yet this system of obtaining nominating commit- tees, so different from that customary in American politics, and defiant of the common rule that the nom- inating conventions must be selected every year at a public meeting or primary election open to every member of the party, was doubtless one of the causes of the success of the people's party. Lacking the element of popular participation, the leading men of the party understood that the nominating convention must be composed of men occupying reputable posi- tions in business and society. They were so composed, and they commanded the confidence of the public, whereas the democratic and republican conventions included many ruffians and men without property or reputable occupation. R. H. Dana, jr., a lawyer and statesman of high ability and strict veracity, having visited California in 1859, when the acts of the com- mittee were fresh in the minds of the people, and its
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influence over the municipal administration dominant, wrote thus:
And now the most quiet and well-governed city in the United States. But it has been through its season of heaven-defying crime, violence and blood, from which it was rescued and handed back to soberness, morality and good goverment by that peculiar invention of Anglo-Saxon republican America, the sol- emn, awe-inspiring vigilance committee of the most grave and responsible citizens, the last resort of the thinking and the good, taken only when vice, fraud and ruffianism have en- trenched themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage and ballot.
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